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“For example, in a chapter of Rewarding Strivers (The Century Foundation, 2010) titled “How Increasing College Access Is Increasing Inequality, and What to Do about It,” Carnevale and Strohl offer compelling evidence on how income quartile impacts college graduation rates. This research shows that when observing students who score in the middle range on the SAT (between 1,000 and 1,200), 66% from the top income quartile graduate college by age 24. For those in the lowest income quartile, it is 17%.

Simply put, this is a shocking finding. These are students at the same band of ability as measured by their SAT scores, and yet students from the highest income quartile are four times more likely to get a degree by age 24 than students in the lowest income quartile. If you only look at top performers—students who have above 1,200 SAT scores—the trend persists. The highest income quartile achieves a college degree 82% of the time by age 24, while those in the lowest income quartile do so just 44% of the time. “

-Guided Pathways Demystified: Exploring Ten Commonly Asked Questions about Implementing Pathways

Children eligible for Medicaid for more of their childhood are less likely to drop out of high school and likelier to earn a college bachelor's degree, a National Bureau of Economic Research study finds. The authors conclude:

How a two-year college bakes a four-year degree into its allied health program.

Mesa College is one of 12 California community colleges (including SMC) that will be offering four-year degrees in the next few years.

This article looks at the work behind the scenes as it prepared it’s program in Health Information Technology (HIT).

#comm_college #higher ed

Some proposed privacy laws for students could unintentionally choke off the data’s original purpose: assessing and improving education.

“In response to such concerns, some pending legislation would scale back the authority of schools, districts and states to share student data with third parties, including researchers. Perhaps the most stringent of these proposals, sponsored by Senator David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, would effectively end the analysis of student data by outside social scientists. This legislation would have banned recent prominent research documenting the benefits of smaller classes, the value of excellent teachers and the varied performance of charter schools. “

#research #comm_college

SMC’s Student Survey on Sexual Assault & Harassment

To comply with White House recommendations, Santa Monica College conducted a campus-wide survey of students to gauge the prevalence of sexual assault on campus and assess students’ attitudes and awareness about this issue. The purpose of the survey was to help the college better understand the scope of the problem and to develop practices and programs to respond more effectively when a student is assaulted. A total of 1,766 surveys (paper-based and online) were completed by students between March 22nd and April 6th, 2015. Some key findings from the survey are:

Overall, students reported that they felt it was likely that the college would handle incidents of both sexual assault or harassment appropriately, however, students’ ratings of how the college would handle an incident report were significantly higher (i.e., positive, favorable) for sexual assault than for harassment.

Agreement was generally weak about students’ knowledge of reporting procedures. The weakest area of knowledge is the process of what happens when a student reports a claim.

About 60% of students reported they had received information or education about sexual assault before coming to SMC.

About 56% of students reported that they did not receive any written or verbal information about sexual assault from someone at SMC.

Students reported an average rating of awareness between “slightly aware” and “somewhat aware” of Psychological Services and other community resources for sexual assault.

Nearly 13% of students reported having experienced a form of sexual assault prior to coming to SMC; nearly 4% of students reported experiencing sexual assault while they were a student at SMC.

About half of students who reported having had an experience of unwanted sexual contact did not report where the incident occurred (52.1%), 42.7% reported that the incident occurred off-campus, and about 5.2% reported that the incident occurred on campus.

About 8% of students reported having witnessed sexual intimidation or harassment on campus.

You can read the complete report here.

#comm_college #higher ed #SMC

pewresearch

Earlier in January, the Pew Research Center released the full dataset from our largest study ever conducted on U.S. politics, the 2014 Political Polarization and Typology survey, to make it available to researchers. Here's how you can access that dataset, as well as our others.

Here’s a datasets 101 post written by our chief methodologist for all of you aspiring number-crunchers.

Pew Research datasets are widely used by scholars and students. Among the hundreds of survey datasets available, here are some of the most popular and frequently downloaded:

Internet, Science & Technology: 25th Anniversary of the Web (2014)

Social & Demographic Trends: 2013 Gender and Generations

Global Attitudes: Spring 2013 Survey Data (39 nations)

Religion & Public Life: 2013 A Portrait of Jewish Americans

U.S. Politics & Policy: 1987-2012 Values Survey Combined Dataset

Hispanic Trends: 2012 National Survey of Latinos

Internet, Science & Technology: 2013 Online Dating

Religion & Public Life: 2010 U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey

But evolutions in various disciplines and in learning sciences are calling into question the relevance and utility of this trajectory as a requirement for all students. The emerging movement is toward differentiated “math pathways” with distinct trajectories tied to students’ goals. Alternatives emphasizing statistics, modeling, computer science, and quantitative reasoning that are cropping up in high schools and colleges are beginning to challenge the dominance of the familiar math sequence.

On May 14, 2015, CCRC and AACC hosted a book talk and panel on Redesigning America's Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success, by Thomas Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars, and Davis Jenkins. Panelists discussed institution-wide reforms that have the potential to help community colleges dramatically improve student success

Since the launch of the Complete College America “Game Changer” strategies at Purdue University Calumet, the university has more than doubled the percentage of students enrolled in 15+ credits during their first semester (27% in 2012 to 66% in 2014). Fall 2014 retention for first-time, full-time studentsincreased by 4.7 percentage points. Overall, more students are on track to complete on time, and Calumet is better positioned for long-term sustainability in student success.

To meet the needs of students, some schools are moving away from the “self-service” model of education.

But the dark side of choice and flexibility is complexity, disorientation and disconnectedness. A course catalogue containing hundreds of classes and dozens of program areas confronts students, who receive limited help in deciding what to study (adviser to student ratios exceed 1 to 1,000 at many colleges) and may have difficulty determining the classes they need to complete a degree or to transfer to a four-year college without losing credits. Many students drift aimlessly for years, accumulating credits but coming no nearer to earning a degree.

#CCRC #SMC

If Santa Monica College had relied solely on data analytics to predict whether Jaime J. would succeed, the picture would have looked bleak. He was, after all, a financially struggling, first-generation Hispanic student who was juggling a job with classes. His math skills were shaky.

But there was more to the picture than that. Using a 30-minute online assessment that focuses on noncognitive skills, advisers at the two-year institution in Southern California learned that Jaime was also a conscientious student with good study habits who had long dreamed of becoming a computer engineer.

Couple of things to note:

1. Hey cool, that’s us!

2. This is NOT an example of looking “Beyond the Data”, in fact quite the opposite. The use of the “Success Navigator” assessment is an attempt to provide counselors with a larger set of data that they can use to more quickly, and accurately, identify students such as Jaime. In a college where enrollments reach upwards of 29,000 (including 6,000 new students each fall term), this an attempt to leverage data analytics in order to increase student success.

#SMC #GRIT

As colleges and universities strive to increase the number of students graduating in four years and prepare students for life after college, they should consider creating college experiences that include deep, experiential learning and faculty care and support. Creating an on-campus environment that harbors the necessary experiences that could increase preparedness and four-year attainment rates might also benefit students financially. Extending college beyond the "traditional" four years damages students' lifetime earnings profile, according to New York Federal Reserve researchers Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz. The net present value of an extra year of college is $65,319. This figure includes tuition and fees and opportunity costs of extra time in school and wage earnings.

For starters, Goodman is back in school, at Santa Monica College. She’s taking classes like Intro to Computer Science and Internet Programming, working toward a computer science degree. "This is something that will run parallel to the band," Goodman tells us. "We’re working hard on La Sera stuff, but that still leaves a lot of downtime, and I find programming super-fulfilling. Getting my (associate of science degree) in computer science is a nice way to fill up my empty hours and lets me use my brain in a different way. Also, it could lead to a career in the future."

Sooooomebody in the Institutional Research office has a small La Sera poster in their office. They think this is very cool news.

The results show that although a credential from an elite university results in more employer responses for all candidates, black candidates from elite universities only do as well as white candidates from less selective universities. Moreover, race results in a double penalty: When employers respond to black candidates, it is for jobs with lower starting salaries and lower prestige than those of white peers.

The University of Colorado, a national leader in the overhaul of teaching science, tested thousands of students over several years, before and after they each took an introductory physics class, and reported in 2008 that students in transformed classes had improved their scores by about 50 percent more than those in traditional classes.

Another in a long line of #SMRT ideas from our 48th state...

The culprit may be freshman science courses, suggests research out of Harvard. Students' experiences in their first-year science courses are the "most influential" in their decisions to stick with a major or not, yet most students aren't happy with those courses. They cite a lack of "faculty-student interaction, 'coldness' of the classroom, lack of preparation and organization, and dullness of presentations" as proof that they're receiving "poor teaching."

These kinds of problems drove three physics professors at California State University, Long Beach to develop a new software tool for their own classes, which they are now marketing more broadly through a start-up company. Koondis, as it's called, works in traditional large introductory lecture classrooms, blended classes and fully online courses that often are filled with students enrolled from various disciplines who are required to be there for their majors.

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